Everything You Should Know about Online Video Direct Distribution Platforms

Every content creator or content publisher would be asking a question on why to grow beyond video aggregators like YouTube, Vimeo etc. This blog post will discuss about the current online video landscape and the strategies content owners can adopt to evolve with the latest distribution practices and raise ROI in the longer run.

Over the past half a decade, content owners have realised that presence on Google’s YouTube is very much mandatory due to its sheer dominance in the online video industry. There are many reasons why YouTube rocks the online video content market. A few are:

• 1 billion plus users
• Every day billions of views are made with a watch time of hundreds of millions of hours.
• Watch time is steadily increasing at a rate of 50% every year
• Every minute 300 hours of video content is uploaded
• 60% of the video views happen to be from overseas
• Available in 61 languages and is localised in 75 countries
• More than half of the total traffic comes from mobile devices
• Mobile YouTube revenue increases 100% every year

Despite these bright spots, it cannot be said that there can be never a fall for YouTube, because as of 2013 market share of YouTube has dropped to 23.7%, which is a17& loss within a period of 2 years.

Exhibit 1

Moreover there are newer video platforms coming up and they get a good amount of content as well. This happens because content owners want to increase the reach of their content to a varied segment of audience by making their presence in every platform. This may not be true as reach alone doesn’t decide success in OTT platforms and especially for niche players with the focus on a specific content this holds very true.

What newer direct distribution platforms like Pivotshare and VHX offer is more than just content distribution. A few of their features are:

A direct connection with the audience

Engagement with the subscribers

Knowing subscriber needs

Offering a personalised experience

Customised content strategy

A perfect blend of SVOD, AVOD and TVOD for long term monetisation.

Having a direct connection with the subscribers gives you a firsthand experience on the consumer needs and hence a customised content plan or strategy is very much possible. Thus there will be more control on the content and its monetisation along with better analytics -and not just aggregated view data- that can help in business decisions.

An effective strategy for a content business is to know what to create based on what their viewers want, and how much they are willing to pay from their pocket to view that content.

As per Comscore analysis of online multi-platform, multi-device video consumption during London Olympics 2012, the more the devices or the screens, the more time spent on viewing.

Exhibit 2

These numbers have gone up exponentially over the last three years and creators are more focused to give a connected experience to their viewers. Millennials make use of the different devices for different reasons: bigger screens for experience, smaller screens for mobility and second screen engagement.

There are many factors that content creators should focus on including better quality, personalised experience time-to-market, and effective distribution. Direct distribution would be a game changer when strategised effectively to grab attention of the users that are scattered across various channels, instead of having a strong dependency on aggregators like YouTube, Vimeo, etc.

Apart from distribution it is mandatory to have good quality content as per the requirements of the user as they say ‘Content is the King and will remain the King forever’. Creating quality content helps much in its distribution.

VideoReady is one of the turnkey OTT solutions offered by TO THE NEW that helps in the distribution of your content across any platforms with simple steps. See below what benefits VideoReady has to offer:

Product Head for mobile first Online Video startup at TO THE NEW.
Product Management for Online Video Platform business of TTN.
Strategic Planning @ Sony- Video on Demand platforms
MBA Graduate from the Asian Institute of Management- Manila